A classic work of history, ethnography, and botany, and an examination of the life and environs of the 18th-century south. William Bartram was a naturalist, artist, and author of Travels through North and South Carolina, Georgia, East and West Florida, the Cherokee Country, the ExtensiveTerritories of the Muscogulees, or Creek Confederacy, and the Country of the Choctaws. The book, based on his journey across the South, reflects a remarkable coming of age. In 1773, Bartram departed his family home near Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, as a British colonist; in 1777, he returned as a citizen of an emerging nation of the United States. The account of his journey, published in 1791, established a national benchmark for nature writing and remains a classic of American literature, scientific writing, and history. Brought up as a Quaker, Bartram portrayed nature through a poetic lens of experience as well as scientific observation, and his work provides a window on 18th-century southern landscapes. Particularly enlightening and appealing are Bartram’s detailed accounts of Seminole, Creek, and Cherokee peoples. The Bartram Trail Conference fosters Bartram scholarship through biennial conferences held along the route of his travels. This richly illustrated volume of essays, a selection from recent conferences, brings together scholarly contributions from history, archaeology, and botany. The authors discuss the political and personal context of his travels; species of interest to Bartram; Creek architecture; foodways in the 18th-century south, particularly those of Indian groups that Bartram encountered; rediscovery of a lost Bartram manuscript; new techniques for charting Bartram’s trail and imaging his collections; and a fine analysis of Bartram’s place in contemporary environmental issues.

Fields in Vision offers a comprehensive and analytical study of the international phenomenon of television sports coverage. Garry Whannel considers the historical development of sport on television, the growth of sponsorship and the way that television and sponsorship have re-shaped sport in the context of the enterprise culture. Drawing on archival research, Whannel first charts the development of the BBC Outside Broadcast department, and the growing battle for dominance between BBC and ITV, showing how sponsorship and the rising power of sports agents began to transform sport - not only in the UK but across the world - in the 1960s. He goes on to examine the implications of this vast and escalating global network during the 1980s by analysing the central role that stars and narratives began to play in television sport, presenting case studies of major contests such as Coe versus Ovett and Decker versus Budd. His study also takes into account one of the more indirect, but no less significant results of international televised sport - the rise of popular fitness chic and the American monopoly of the workout boom of the 1980s. Fields in Vision explains the development of television sport by linking its economic transformation with the cultural forms through which it is represented, offering a study encompassing not simply the sports world, but our relationship with television and the media industries as a whole.

Filmed images dominate our time, from the movies and TV that entertain us to the news and documentary that inform us and shape our cultural vocabulary. Crossing disciplinary boundaries, Fields of Vision is a path-breaking collection that inquires into the power (and limits) of film and photography to make sense of ourselves and others. As critics, social scientists, filmmakers, and literary scholars, the contributors converge on the issues of representation and the construction of visual meaning across cultures. From the dismembered bodies of horror film to the exotic bodies of ethnographic film and the gorgeous bodies of romantic cinema, Fields of Vision moves through eras, genres, and societies. Always asking how images work to produce meaning, the essays address the way the "real" on film creates fantasy, news, as well as "science," and considers this problematic process as cultural boundaries are crossed. One essay discusses the effects of Hollywood's high-capital, world-wide commercial hegemony on local and non-Western cinemas, while another explores the response of indigenous people in central Australia to the forces of mass media and video. Other essays uncover the work of the unconscious in cinema, the shaping of "female spectatorship" by the "women's film" genre of the 1920s, and the effects of the personal and subjective in documentary films and the photographs of war reportage. In illuminating dark, elided, or wilfully neglected areas of representation, these essays uncover new fields of vision.

Fields of Vision marks a departure from previous book-length approaches to Philippine film criticism in its scholarly application of modernist principles. Such issues as auteurism, structuralism, and spectatorship are pursued with the view of testing their usefulness for Philippine cinema, instead of simply dismissing them in the wake of more recent methodologies.

A comprehensive survey on the use of bedside skills and perimetric devices to the test visual fields, and how to interpret the results. To develop the clinician's interpretative skills, the authors include a chapter on visual anatomy and an atlas of 100 real-life cases arranged in anatomic order from retina to striate cortex. By placing a brief clinical vignette with a visual field on one side of the page and a description of the field and its causal lesion on the opposite side, the reader will be able to learn interpretation in a simulated clinical setting. An additional quiz section of twenty randomly arranged visual fields provides readers with an opportunity to test their newly acquired skills.

Landscape imagery, according to Stephen Daniels, is not merely a reflection of, or distraction from, more pressing social, economic, or political issues; it is often a powerful mode of knowledge and social engagement. As exemplars of moral order and aesthetic harmony, particular landscapes achieve the status of national icons, and imperialists, almost by definition, have annexed the homelands of others in their identity myths, projecting on foreigners pictorial codes that express both an affinity with the colonizing country and an estrangement from it. In this provocative book Daniels shows how various artists--including painters, landscape designers, and architects--have articulated national identities in England and the United States from the later eighteenth century to the present day. The author looks especially at those artists who have been the focus of a heritage debate and who have been featured in exhibitions in the last decade (such as the controversial The West as America: Reinterpreting Images of the Frontier at the National Museum of American Art). Analyzing works of Christopher Wren, John Constable, J.M.W. Turner, Thomas Cole, Humphry Repton, Joseph Wright, and Frances Palmer (the leading artist for Currier and Ives), Daniels also examines how landscape conventions developed in England were deployed in definitions of American national identity. The author denies that his intention is iconoclastic. Instead, he wishes to amplify the eloquence of the images he treats, even if this means rendering their meaning more mutable and ambiguous than their nationalist admirers might concede.

State-of-the-art research on MRFs, successful MRF applications, and advanced topics for future study. This volume demonstrates the power of the Markov random field (MRF) in vision, treating the MRF both as a tool for modeling image data and, utilizing recently developed algorithms, as a means of making inferences about images. These inferences concern underlying image and scene structure as well as solutions to such problems as image reconstruction, image segmentation, 3D vision, and object labeling. It offers key findings and state-of-the-art research on both algorithms and applications. After an introduction to the fundamental concepts used in MRFs, the book reviews some of the main algorithms for performing inference with MRFs; presents successful applications of MRFs, including segmentation, super-resolution, and image restoration, along with a comparison of various optimization methods; discusses advanced algorithmic topics; addresses limitations of the strong locality assumptions in the MRFs discussed in earlier chapters; and showcases applications that use MRFs in more complex ways, as components in bigger systems or with multiterm energy functions. The book will be an essential guide to current research on these powerful mathematical tools.

In this contemplative collection of essays, Lisa Knopp moves out from the prairies of Nebraska and Iowa to encompass a fully developed vision of light, memory, change, separateness, time, symbols, responsibility, and unity. Knopp charts a stimulating course among the individual, community, and culture that removes the boundaries between self and other, allowing one to become fully present in the world. Her keen vision sees beyond the ordinary to illuminate the mysteries and meanings of our personal and natural worlds.

"Wright Morris seems to me the most important novelist of the American middle generation. Through a large body of work -which, unaccountably, has yet to receive the wide attention it deserves--Mr. Morris has adhered to standards which we have come to identify as those of the most serious literary art. His novel The Field of Vision brilliantly climaxes his most richly creative period. It is a work of permanent significance and relevance to those who cannot be content with less than a full effort to cope with the symbolic possibilities of the human condition at the present time."--John W. Aldridge

Stylish, inspiring, driven and demanding journalist Kenneth Allsop chased international news stories and their creators across post-war Britain and America through unending pain from an artificial limb.